AMD's Infinity Fabric detailed

So what is the big deal about it? Well, even if you are to leave all the high level talk behind, one of the biggest impacts of Infinity Fabric is that it will allow AMD to fully utilize DRAM available to any SoC or GPU. This means that textbook and theoretical performance limits will be achievable and will result in an overall power efficient architectural design.

Secondly if you take a look at the slides, you will notice how the Infinity Fabric is now so much more than just HyperTransport. It is the physical implementation of AMD’s all-encompassing Lego philosophy, for lack of a better word, where everything is fully scalable and 100% flexible.

Infinity Fabric is a coherent implementation which means that cache coherency is maintained across multiple processors externally and scaling up cores, in a CPU or a GPU, is not a problem and only limited by the bandwidth of the transport itself (which we have mentioned above). This philosophy is in contrast to Intel’s stricter vision of a tailor-made design. It also allows AMD to scale up and down designs within a matter of hours rather than months without spending additional human capital or resources. This flexibility will allow it to serve a larger number of custom clients than anyone else.

AMD’s Infinity Fabric is basically divided into two distinct components or philosophies. Data Fabric scalability and Control Fabric scalability. When we usually talk about scalability, we are talking about the Data Fabric portion of things. This includes the HyperTransport concept, and the scalability in terms of cores/CPUs/dies etc. Needless to say we have already seen firsthand how well AMD is able to handle a diversified range of custom solutions.

The second offshoot is called the Control Fabric and is something that is newer, and very interesting. It extends the same concept but on a more intelligent level. For example, Ryzen will have machine learning integrated into the processor design so it will get modestly better at recurring tasks. Intel also has its own branch of prediction management but lets not get into that right now. This is just one example of the intelligent approach to the control design that has been taken as far as Infinity Fabric is concerned.

All of these things combined means that we will be seeing products from AMD that are constructed using a unified, flexible platform that uses a similar building block in just about everything. Oh and compatibility will be the cornerstone of this design implementation. I assume this would only solidify AMD’s position in the console market because the company will literally be handling them all more flexibility than they could ever ask for.